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Jacob Schlichter with an image of “Sunflowers in Starlight.” Alex Guerrero/Albert Lea Tribune

“Sunflowers in Starlight,” was taken at the sunflower fields in Manchester by Jacob Schlichter. Provided

“HWY 105” will be one of the astrophotos Schlichter will have on display at the Rochester airport. He said it took took two years of planning and preparations for him to get the right shot. Provided

Jacob Schlichter is an Albert Lea photographer and fashion designer who grew up in the area.

His interest in photography goes back to high school.

“I saw a lot of my friends were running around with cameras and I wasn’t familiar with an actual camera as much as I was with a video camera,” said Schlichter, referring to recording snowmobiling on GoPro cameras.

From there, he transitioned to photography in high school.

“Right off the bat I was just in love with it,” he said.

And he’s been doing photography ever since, almost a decade now. For him, photography allowed him to capture a moment or place and share it with people who wouldn’t otherwise be able to experience the moment or place themselves.

He also loves capturing people in events and time in what he called event photography.

“It was just really cool to be able to capture all these people just in a moment of bliss,” he said, referring to photographs from concerts or festivals.

“I have always had a lifelong love of astronomy,” he said. “I used to want to be an astronomer, and then when I discovered photography I was like, ‘Wait a minute. There’s an intersection that I can put all my passion and love into?’”

He’s been going nonstop ever since.

And his passion for photography has led him to being recognized by the Rochester airport, after leaders of the airport put out a call for art. Schlichter figured that because Rochester has an international airport, visitors would likely be visiting local areas. And his three submissions all focused on local places.

“I figured that the airport would appreciate that,” he said. “I figured the people at Rochester International would also appreciate that.”

He described his first piece, “HWY 105,” as an astrophoto that took two years.

“I spent that entire time scouting locations throughout the year, because in astrophotography even 15 seconds and your whole photo is ruined,” he said. “Everything is misaligned. So it took a lot of planning every night.”

He said he spent a lot of long nights looking for the right location. And he found the right spot on Minnesota Highway 105 seven miles south of Austin.

“I had to plan it for the summer, the right time of year for that Milky Way to be in the sky for the trees to line up with the leading lines,” he said.

He took the photo roughly seven miles south of Austin on Minnesota Highway 105 in Mower County. 

His second submission, “Sunflowers in Starlight,” was taken at the sunflower fields in Manchester.

“I combined light painting and astrophotography,” he said. “… Astrophotography is basically the combination of astronomy and photography. Basically you’re taking photos of the stars.”

The photo is actually his second sunflower work.

“This time I lucked out because the way they cut the trails into the sunflowers actually made a really beautiful-looking path that lit up the barn in the background,” he said. “It gave me a nice background element with the foreground being the sunflowers and the light trail leading right up to the Milky Way.”

And depending on how complicated the artist wants it to be, an artist could get anything from a Milky Way photo to star tracking and doing star trails or deep-space photography.

Getting the shot wasn’t as simple as getting there and snapping away either, and Schlichter said getting the shot required a “pretty good understanding” of moon cycles, his positioning related to Earth, light pollution and knowing where to shoot.

“You need really, really good quality equipment to really pull this off in an effective manner that isn’t just gonna look blurry or noisy,” he said.

Lens quality was also important for astrophotography, something he described as “make or break.” 

“You get a decent prime lens and the quality of glass is going to make all the difference in whether or not you get a pin prick sharp star, or if it’s blurry or you get the chromation on the edges of each star that’s making it off white or pink or blue,” he said.

In viewing his pieces, he wants viewers to gain a deeper appreciation for the natural beauty of Minnesota.

“I think southern Minnesota is pretty slept-on in terms of the actual natural beauty that we do provide,” he said. “I know we don’t have the Driftless Area from Winona, we don’t have the … waterfalls in northern Minnesota or the woods, but there’s still a lot of beauty down here.”

Schlichter first heard about the call after an email was forwarded to him, which he thinks was from the Albert Lea Art Center.

Though he’d done a gallery exhibit before, Schlichter admitted he usually shied away from submitting work as part of a competition, though he had submitted work for the state fair.

“I’m not the best at marketing myself or taking advantage of some opportunities,” he said.

The other reason he doesn’t do these: He doesn’t hear about them. 

But he talked himself into submitting pieces for consideration, and said he thought this was an opportunity to submit work people might enjoy.

What convinced him to do this was his familiarity with the airport in Rochester and admitted to having a good time whenever he’d flown through there. He made the decision to submit a day after he heard about the call early this month.

“With the location in mind I just had some really cool captures, some really cool photos that I thought people that would be going through the airport would appreciate,” he said.

Though Schlichter didn’t know when the work would be displayed, he knows it will be on the other side of Transportation Security Administration, meaning his work won’t be available to see unless you’re flying to or from the airport. He also said people in charge of the project were thinking about a public exhibition, but they were currently trying to get all selected artists together to discuss the possibility beforehand. The deadline for accepted artists to drop art off is Friday, and the work will be publicly displayed starting either late next summer or early next fall.

“I was just really excited,” he said after learning two of his pieces were accepted. “I was shocked, I was really happy.” 

In the meantime, he’s working on winter pieces, some of which require knowledge of basic coding and “a few federal licenses” that take longer to complete.

Besides photography, Schlichter enjoys fashion.

“I have a really cool nature-inspired hat coming out, and I basically sew on about 140 different leaves onto a bucket hat so it kind of looks like you’re wearing a bush,” he said.

Anyone interested should visit https://getslicks.com to browse the store.

Growing up in Orland Park near Homer Glen, Jasonn Pellegrini was always fascinated by the idea of space exploration.

“When you’re a kid, everyone wants to be an astronaut or something like that, and my parents bought me a telescope,” Pellegrini said. “It wasn’t a fancy, expensive one. It was your generic department store one, but it allowed me to see the moon and Jupiter and its moons. It hooked me.”

Now 45 years old and living in Lemont, Pellegrini maintained that passion for astronomy. When the pandemic started, he found himself with more time on his hands. So, with some landscape photography under his belt and a degree in graphic design, he bought some equipment to mix his interests by taking photos of the night sky.

He tried it, enjoyed it and realized he could see a lot more of what’s in the sky after working to combat light pollution.

“I wish more people would be concerned about light pollution,” Pellegrini said. “It doesn’t just affect us as hobbyists; it affects real science.”

Pellegrini uses a telescope, tracker, camera, lenses, filters to cut light pollution, mounts and computer software to capture and create images of the moon, sun, planets, asteroids, stars and galaxies. His favorite things to capture through astrophotography are nebulae, or space clouds.

Pellegrini said he would love to shoot more galaxies, but light pollution makes a much bigger difference with those and equipment can be much more expensive. A photographer can get “beautiful pictures” of the Milky Way with a camera, lens and a simple tracker that costs a couple hundred dollars, Pellegrini said. While there is a big market for used equipment, astrophotography definitely comes at a cost.

“It’s not cheap,” Pellegrini said. “It’s a level of how far you want to get into it. It really ranges. … If you want to go all out, you can spend $10,000, $15,000, $20,000, plus more. There’s telescopes out there that cost $60,000.”

Time is also a big investment. Many of Pellegrini’s images require hours — sometimes the bulk of an evening — to capture. He takes multiple exposures that are 3-5 minutes long, and then stacks them for greater detail. While he sometimes experiments when surprised by something interesting, most of his work takes careful planning. Pellegrini also has spent a lot of time checking forums, posts, websites and online videos to educate himself about astrophotography techniques, and looks to astronomy clubs and groups for even more help.

“It’s definitely a process to learn it,” Pellegrini said. “I don’t know if you ever really stop, because there’s always new things coming out and you’re always trying to tweak things to make things better.”

Most of Pellegrini’s images are captured out of his backyard in Lemont. He also made the pilgrimage to the annual Nebraska Star Party near Valentine, Nebraska, for the renowned dark skies there.

“The sky is just amazing to see with your own eyes,” he said. “The Milky Way will cast a shadow — it’s that dark there.”

Astrophotography from dark sky areas such as the Nebraska Star Party is “vastly different,” Pellegrini said.

“It’s not necessarily the quality; it’s the time,” he said. “What would take you a half-hour there will take you 8 hours here. There are some things you really can’t photograph around here.”

Among those things are dark nebulae, essentially dust clouds that are not lit, requiring the photographer to block out the light behind them.

“It’s basically impossible to get around here,” he said. “It’s just not dark enough for that.”

Light pollution is one of the biggest problems Pellegrini faces in astrophotography. He occasionally picks a target that ends up being too dim to get data. And dealing with so much technology can present its own set of problems.

“Every once in a while you get a night that stuff just don’t want to run,” Pellegrini said. “Your telescope doesn’t want to run right, your mount doesn’t want to track. There’s a gazillion things that can go wrong.”

But he has honed his process for a 70-75% success rate.

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“As you get more versed in what you’re doing, you become more successful more often,” he said.

Pellegrini recently presented his work and methods to a capacity crowd at the Homer Township Public Library through a partnership with the Lemont Artists Guild. Lynn Rozycki, vice president of the Guild, said she learned about Pellegrini’s work by word-of-mouth and was amazed by what he could do.

“It’s just awesome,” she said. “You don’t see that much work with that quality and detail.”

Pellegrini said some people in the Chicago area don’t even realize how much sky detail they are missing. He encourages everyone to get out somewhere without so much light pollution — it doesn’t have to be Nebraska — and look up. He also suggests pointing lights down at home and making sure to turn them off at night when not needed to reduce some of the pollution.

“You don’t know until you go someplace like Nebraska what you’re missing, what’s lost in these areas,” he said. “I think people need to see that with their own eyes at least once in their life.”

Pellegrini said he hopes to start selling prints of his work at some point. For now, people can see his images along with the technical aspects of what he does on AstroBin under the user named Starlancer, via Instagram @starlancerastro and through ArtPal under jpastro.

Bill Jones is a freelance reporter for the Daily Southtown.

Astronomers have raised concerns over a new satellite that is now one of the brightest objects in the night sky that could also hinder astrophotographers.

The BlueWalker 3 satellite from Texas-based AST SpaceMobile fully deployed its huge 693-foot communication array a couple of weeks ago. It is the largest antenna of any commercial communications satellite.

As more and more satellites are sent into Earth’s orbit they begin to obscure the night sky.

‘Dismayed at the Streaks on my Camera’s Sensor’

It’s been widely reported that SpaceX’s Starlink satellites have been photobombing astronomy pictures, causing satellite streaks to appear in images.

And astrophotographer Joshua Defibaugh tells PetaPixel that he is concerned about BlueWalker 3.

“The night sky is perhaps the last vestige of beauty in our changing world. The earth is warming at considerable rates, but it’s also getting brighter each year, between two and six percent each year by some estimates,” he says.

“Each time I venture out in a national park or dark sky site to photograph the Milky Way, I’m always dismayed at the streaks that cross my camera’s sensor. Planes and satellites fill the sky and there’s always an orange haze glowing in the distance.”

In January, the American Astronomical Society reported that “the number of affected images is increasing with time as SpaceX deploys more satellites.”

Data on the problem is still hard to come by, but it’s expected to get worse with more and more satellites being launched every year.

Warning

The International Astronomical Union (IAU) has now warned of the danger posed by the intense brightness emanating from the BlueWalker 3.

“[It] is a big shift in the constellation satellite issue and should give us all reason to pause,” says Piero Benvenuti, an astrophysicist at the University of Padova in Italy and an IAU representative.

The IAU has outlined two main reasons why humans should worry about ultra-bright satellites.

The first is simply: “humanity’s ability to experience the natural night sky.”

The second is that astronomers are concerned that satellites are encroaching on their ability to carry out scientific studies.

“Astronomers build radio telescopes as far away as possible from human activity, looking for places on the planet where there is limited or no cell phone coverage,” explains SKAO Director-General Philip Diamon.

“Frequencies allocated to cell phones are already challenging to observe even in radio-quiet zones we have created for our facilities. New satellites such as BlueWalker 3 have the potential to worsen this situation and compromise our ability to do science if not properly mitigated.”

A spokesperson for AST SpaceMobile responded to the IAU’s statement by pointing out that their mission is an attempt to “solve the major global problem of lack of connectivity, which affects billion of people around the world.”

“We are building the first and only space-based cellular broadband network — one that is designed to provide coverage to areas currently beyond the reach of today’s networks.

“Our planned network aims to connect devices around the world and support a universal good. Cellular broadband for more people globally would help ease poverty, support economic development, build a more equitable and diverse digital society, and save lives.”